Archive for April, 2016

First I helped assist with the birth of CREATE Space Earth and I’m working passionately to bring about the very first real live local CREATE hub in a community, somewhere, soon… (If you want to help make that happen faster, in any way, please do contact me! My email address is on the sidebar just to the right of this column, or find me on Reddit with the username “Turil”. The project could really use a couple more creative doers to push it over that tipping point.)

And now, I’m offering up to you a sister project to help collect expertise for solving any and all problems we encounter for getting our basic needs met in life. The goal is a global repository for practical solutions to improve the quality of life for all!

It’s just an announcement page right now, but it’s a live site, fully hosted (not glommed into some freebie site like this blog is. :-), and I’m actively looking for ideas on what the best way to build a how-to type site that can be highly organized and searchable in multiple levels and categories. Something better than a wiki… Suggestions?

If this sounds a little familiar, it is very similar to my older project Binikou, only updated and broader, and less focused on kids. Kids are still very welcome to use it, but it’s more focused on being a basic DIY instructional database for collecting any and all solutions for using resource A to get need B. The CREATE Spaces will feed into this site, I imagine, once they get up and running, as will any techies, artists, educators, and everyone else who’s found a good way to do something useful and wants to share that discovery with the world.

So, yeah, my big master plan is coming together. Slowly, but surely. That’s how turtles roll! I’m excited, and happy to have a way to focus all of my energies in the areas that are most appropriate, given the general categories of what our planetary system needs to be healthy. Things are actually starting to move forward again, with some real promise of breaking through into the mainstream for once. Expect magic! (The real kind!)

Because our own perceptions of external reality are always colored by our own subjective experiences, goals, beliefs, etc., when it comes to the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, as well as identifying Artificial Intelligence, the question of whether or not we decide that some “other” is “intelligent” or was designed on “purpose”, may be moot. In any long sequence of ones and zeros we can always find some “interesting” pattern.

So I propose a slightly modified version of Alan Turing’s famous test which can be boiled down to asking:

Is this thing able to take in my goals and offer an unexpected and useful solution for achieving those goals?

The wider the variety of goals a thing can offer solutions for, and the more useful those solutions are, compared to one’s own solutions, the more “intelligent” we might want to label this thing, if that is the sort of thing we really want to spend our time doing, that is.

There are so many myths and misconceptions about why someone would commit a hate crime or otherwise want to harm someone else, especially when it comes to things like identity (gender, culture, age, shape, size, lifestyle, beliefs, etc.). I offer a simple way to look at hate that allows us to see the heart of the problem, so that we might better address it, effectively and compassionately.

This episode was inspired by a BBC World Service radio show that talked about a man who took up boxing after being attacked after coming out of a gay bar, and a review of a documentary film about philosopher Hannah Arendt and her controversial ideas on Nazi hate crimes.

meta

You count!

I am for you

I do not mean my body is for you,
because I cannot speak for her,
as my body speaks for herself,
sometimes clumsily
sometimes elegantly
sometimes weakly,
sometimes with great strength
and always most independently
and wordlessly.

- a home for myself, my honey, and CREATE Space - a community resource center with artists, teachers, and scientists in residence using creative and innovative solutions to helping everyone in the world get what they need to be more awesome!
- good quality raw food
- transportation from where I am to other interesting places! (I'm currently in Stockton Springs, Maine)
- non-rusty bicycle (an old mtn. bike for a 5'2" human)
- Help starting a global non-profit!
- A hug from DPM :-)